nd who was cast lower
than the poorest: dead, whom millions prayed for in vain. Driven off his
throne; buffeted by rude hands; with his children in revolt; the darling
of his old age killed before him untimely; our Lear hangs over her
breathless lips and cries, 'Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little!' "

Vex not his ghost--oh! let him pass--he hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer!

Hush, Strife and Quarrel, over the solemn grave! Sound, trumpets, a
mournful march! Fall, dark curtain, upon his pageant, his pride, his
grief, his awful tragedy!

George The Fourth

In Twiss's amusing _Life of Eldon_, we read how, on the death of the Duke
of York, the old chancellor became possessed of a lock of the defunct
prince's hair; and so careful was he respecting the authenticity of the
relic, that Bessy Eldon his wife sat in the room with the young man from
Hamlet's, who distributed the ringlet into separate lockets, which each of
the Eldon family afterwards wore. You know how, when George IV came to
Edinburgh, a better man than he went on board the royal yacht to welcome
the king to his kingdom of Scotland, seized a goblet from which his
majesty had just drunk, vowed it should remain for ever as an heirloom in
his family, clapped the precious glass in his pocket, and sat down on it
and broke it when he got home. Suppose the good sheriff's prize unbroken
now at Abbotsford, should we not smile with something like pity as we
beheld it? Suppose one of those lockets of the No-Popery prince's hair
offered for sale at Christie's, _quot libras e duce summo invenies?_ how
many pounds would you find for the illustrious duke? Madame Tussaud has
got King George's coronation robes; is there any man now alive who would
kiss the hem of that trumpery? He sleeps since thirty years: do not any of
you, who remember him, wonder that you once respected and huzza'd and
admired him?

To make a portrait of him at first seemed a matter of small difficulty.
There is his coat, his star, his wig, his countenance simpering under it:
with a slate and a piece of chalk, I could at this very desk perform a
recognizable likeness of him. And yet after reading of him in scores of
volumes, hunting him through old magazines and newspapers, having him here
at a ball, there at a public dinner, there at races and so forth, you find
you have nothing--nothing but a coat and wig and a mask smiling below
it--not